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Imagination Land

All of us live in a silo of our own making to some degree. We read news sites we like and we like them because they tend to cover the stuff we think is important, in a way we hope is accurate. We admire opinions with which we agree. We hang out with people who share our interests. That’s normal. It’s also normal to know it and know others have different opinions and interests. Most normie conservatives get that Fox News is biased toward the Republicans, but they know all of the other stations are heavily biased to the Democrats.

This self-awareness has never applied to the Left. Every normal person has had a conversation with a Progressive friend where they claim the news is biased against them or is too easy on some conservative they currently hate. They will argue that Fox News is poisoning the minds of the public. When you point out that 90% of the mass media is run by hard left true believers, they scoff and say you’re nuts. The hive mind of Progressives has always allowed them to pretend they are surrounded by a sea of their enemies.

One point made by some on the Dissident Right is that this blinkered view of the world has infected the so-called conservatives. They are blind to the intellectual revolution going on over here, because they stare at Lefty all day. Like people looking directly into the sun, they are blind to everything else. As a result, the legacy conservatives carry on like it is 1984 and Dutch Reagan is riding high. Much of what so-called conservatism is these days is just a weird nostalgia trip, celebrating a fictional past with no connection to the present.

There are many reasons why so-called conservatives are becoming irrelevant, but the main reason is that their good friends on the Left are racing off into a fantasy land of their own creation. Listen to a modern Progressive talk and it is a weird combination of echolalic babbling and paranoia about dark forces that are imaginary. Replace “Russian hacking” with “work of the devil” and their howling makes more sense. Things like “foreign meddling” and “institutional racism” are just stand-ins for Old Scratch.

This increasingly weird disconnect between the Left and this place we call earth shows up in their main propaganda organs. Those old enough to remember reading English versions of communist newspapers can recognize the unintended humor on the front pages of the New York Times and Washington Post. This front page item from last week is a good example. Everything in that “news” story describes a world that only exists in the fevered imaginations of the Left. It was a fictional account of present reality written for believers.

This Andrew Sullivan piece bumps up against this reality a little bit, but from a different angle. His argument is that the fantasy land of academia is casting a long shadow over American society, so it is imperative that the college campus be reformed to look something like reality. His framing of things is mostly wrong because he is just a slightly less berserk member of the hive he is trying analyze. His description of the dynamic on campus, though, is correct. It is a world untethered from reality.

The fact is, the college campus is the apotheosis of Progressive spiritualism. It has been dominated by the Left for as long as anyone has been a live. The constant flow of credit money into American higher education has removed all restraints on the people in charge. They are free to indulge whatever fantasies they have at the moment, as no one ever gets fired and the money spigot stays open. As a result, the American college campus is the full flowering of the Progressive imagination. It’s Wakanda for cat ladies.

This lurch into madness is the result of plenty. Up until recent, the threat of nuclear annihilation and the lack of universal prosperity has reined in the excesses of the Left. In order to win elections, Progressive politicians had to focus on better economics and expanding opportunity. Of course, the Cold War kept everyone focused on practical reality, as a mistake could have set off a nuclear exchange. That’s no longer the case as prosperity is near universal, in human terms, and there are no looming threats.

Progressivism has always been a spiritual movement. It is the quest for cosmic justice based on the notion that we are only as good as the weakest among us. That is a fine and noble sentiment, as long as it remains a sentiment. The reality of scarcity has always kept this spiritualism in check. As we enter into what appears to be a post-scarcity world, Progressives are free to explore the far reaches of their mysticism. The result is a ruling class that is looking more like eastern mystics, than pragmatic rulers.

It is why civic nationalism is a dead end street. You see it in the Andrew Sullivan piece about the campus culture. What he is arguing in favor of is the same things we hear from civic nationalists. They all agree with Progressives that we need a unifying religion. They just want a debate about the contours and end points of the religion. The fact that no one has ever pulled this off without ushering in a bloodbath never gets mentioned, Instead, all of these folks prefer to frolic in imagination land, where all their dreams come true.

Absolutely.
While I understand the r/K selection theory I think that the left is actually worse than ‘r’ selected.
Not only are they participating in the feeding frenzy, they are actively destroying the production machine that provides this bonanza.

Which Trump btw is trying to kick-start into overdrive again.

I keep wondering if Trump will only prolong the feeding frenzy, or if he is aware enough to just clean up the show and then let the whole thing collapse. Ensuring the smoothest possible switch to the K-side of things. We will see…

At the heart of collectivism is human sacrifice. From abortion to “Me-Too” the idea is too cull the herd of those not wanted for the sake of the chosen. It is this that must be called out and pinned on the left. Until then, it’s just arguing about details.

Lefties seem to typically have this “self-hate” element to their personalities, and express it by taking it out on others. As if they can purify their own souls by burning others at the stake. I don’t think one can reason with people like that.

Come on, why would a self-educated fruit picker know about deep social trends? Just because he read books and hung out with working people and pondered the lessons of what he admitted himself was “just simple and ordinary human experience?” Surely you jest. I’ve read ‘The True Believer’ six times and I can assure you there’s nothing in it but the tripe one would expect from a workingman who never went to college. In seriousness, ‘The True Believer’ was one of those books I read as a teen, quite at random, that probably screwed me up for life. Actually my… Read more »

Reason with them? We can’t even take them seriously. The ‘Washington Correspondent’ for New York magazine was on Hannity in 2016. She said she was 25 years old, and her only political remark, during an election year, was ‘Trump has white supremacists at his rallies.” The left not only believes the corporate media while claiming to hate corporations, but they’re not even informed enough to know a basic truth — that much of what they take for reality is only play-acting by mobs paid for by George Soros. it’d be like trying to reason with one of my cats.

What if the bloodbath is in fact inevitable? What if the answer is the same as it was before, and even before that? Maybe we should burn their bones on their own heathen altars (Josiah is my favorite OT story).

These last two posts are about the same thing; once you reject empirical fact for postmodernism there is no longer any truth. It also uncovers the uselessness of much of the last 100 years of ‘Psychology’ beginning with Freud (one of the 3 worst ideas in the last century). Applying a medical model of sickness to mental ‘normalcy’ is silly, as evidenced by the ultimately useless terms ‘sociopath’ and ‘psychopath’ in explaining or predicting such behavior, and implying that we will some day be able to treat them as we do a broken leg. As for universities, let’s use an… Read more »

I think we are a lot closer to pegging various personality types, including degrees of sociopathy, than you may think. The process of linking locations on the genome that effect intelligence, for example, is moving quickly. I think they have found ~50 genes to this point. Because of the vast amount of IQ and personality data we currently have, I suspect we learn the genetic causes of cognitive function before we unridddle things like genetic links to cancer or heart disease. Now, psychology is mostly nonsense and Freud will be remembered as we remember Franz Joseph Gall. That does not… Read more »

One advantage of having a couple of kids with learning disabilities has been seeing just how precisely the batteries of cognitive testing can pinpoint capabilities and shortcomings. The science will only get better and destroy the “blank slaters”. Have one kid that at five could simply look at the picture on the front of a 300 piece Lego set, dump it out, turn the box face down and build it in a blink. When tested a couple years later the neuropsychologist basic said “his visio-spatial capability is not measurable on our scale”. I think not only will they nail down… Read more »

Psychotherapy is mostly quackery because most mental health professionals are quacks. It is not because psychotherapy is without value. Good psychotherapy teaches rational thinking and solution focused living. However, good luck finding a clinician who knows how to provide good psychotherapy.

“…..As we enter into what appears to be a post-scarcity world, Progressives are free to explore the far reaches of their mysticism. The result is a ruling class that is looking more like eastern mystics, than pragmatic rulers.” Correct, and I think there is an even further split at the pragmatic ruler level: (1) those who are the true believers who are actually the most scary and (2) the utterly cynical and mercenary. I put people like Hillary Clinton in category (2) since she and her ilk are all about power. They see much of humanity as contemptible (maybe even… Read more »

Ed; I’d say Group 2 considers Group 1 to be useful idiots before the revolution and dangerous rivals afterward. Come the revolution, without enough Group 2, Group 1 can be taken down early on, ending that revolution. Historical examples include both the Hungarian and German Communist Revolutions of 1918-19 that failed. Otherwise Group 2 ultimately takes over the revolution and purges Group 1 even though they probably needed them to get that revolution going in the first place. For example, as soon as Stalin (a Group 2 guy if there ever was one) had cemented his hold on power in… Read more »

Used to be, we were all taught that it was our duty to leave the country in the same shape we found it — the “for ourselves and our posterity” thing. Now, with the left at least, it’s more of a narcissistic-to-the-point-of-madness kind of ‘we’re so far beyond that; we are EVER FORWARD in ‘transforming America” (for the better, of course.) i like the way I was brought up better. Remember what the Bible said about pride?

Thank you, calsdad. As for “post scarcity”, call me skeptical as well. It has a ‘magical thinking’ vibe to it. Post scarcity lasts how long? For ever and ever? For twenty years? What are we shooting for? Industrial revolutions are, someone said, a “once per planet” event. All the “free stuff” under the ground is, or will eventually be gone, and it isn’t coming back. It will be comic reading for those hardy tribes surviving in an exhausted world 200 years from now – the ones who have preserved literacy – to read our pronouncements of infinite plenty and “the… Read more »

Imagination Land is right. No wonder Progressives embrace Wakanda. They’re immersed in a world they’d like to see, and blind to the realities of life. Especially harsh realities. Demands for more and never-ending free stuff and no understanding of basic economic laws, along with magical -We Are the World/I’d Like to Teach the World to Sing -thinking on race and ethnicity and immigration, and marching in parades wearing pink pussy costumes and hats, shrieking nonsense. This isn’t going to end well.

Z Man; Re the Andrew Sullivan piece you linked: I guess I don’t get out much if that’s an example of semi-sanity from the Prog hive mind. To my own mind he just sorta’ swerves between a reversed-image Prog-world and the reality the rest of us experience. For example, take his last section about whether there is a wave of murder of degenerates. He makes a reasonable case that ‘from the small sample size and sketchy stats, we actually can’t say.’ But this apparent swerve into reality is immediately followed by the absurd fantasy of saying that the LGBTQXYZ folks… Read more »

That Sullivan piece is a bit of mess. What I found interesting is that at some level, he seems to notice the gap between what Progressives believe and objective reality. But as I said, he’s just a less berserk Progressive, so he can never see his people in a clear way.

Sullivan is a good example of a person whose reason is overshadowed and controlled by his passions. You can often see in his writing where the rationality breaks down and is replaced by panic at the fear that at some point there won’t be any more guy on guy action to look forward to.

We have as many masters as we have vices and he’s an object example of someone being completely mastered by his libido.

What I would like to see is for solid red states to take control of and reform their state funded universities along right wing lines. Give people an alternative to progressive academia and let’s see what happens.

That brings up another problem. With lefties firmly in control of education – they will move to expand on that control. In Canada the progs want to do away with homeschooling and instead force kids into the public mainstream – where they can receive proper indoctrination on critical issues like race and sexuality.

We need to run these people out of our schools or they’ll steal our youth right out from under our noses. Gen Z will need every advantage we can give them.

LOL. “Or they’ll steal our yutes!!” They already did. Seriously – this is the kind of stuff that I see CONSTANTLY coming from the mouths of “conservatives”. We have to do something now – or the left is going to steal our children!!. Lefties have been firmly in control of education FOR DECADES at least. The public school system is in and of itself a means of control – the people who put it in place in this country – and others – were VERY clear about this. John Taylor Gatto detailed all of this many years ago now. Right… Read more »

I agree. Reform is what you do when you have a relatively stable system, relatively popular support, and relatively honorable public officials. We have none of this. My bet is that there are many decent people in a country like Bolivia, who want for their kids what we want for ours. They’re not quibbling about ‘adjustments’ and ‘reforms’. In all probability they’re talking military rule, looking enviously at Chile, which cleaned itself up under Pinochet and put civil society back on the rails, after some ‘breaking of eggs’. We have to stop thinking like ‘Americans’, and start thinking like Bolivians… Read more »

People need to stop being FORCED to send their kids into public K-12 schools. That would be a good place to start. Movement away from public schools has already started – at least in comparison to where things were say 20 years ago. But the *force* piece of the equation is still there since you have to jump thru a lot of hoops to NOT send your kids into public school. AND – you’re still being forced to pay for them – one way or another. That’s why – IMHO – the most important piece of the equation is to… Read more »

There’s no walking it back at this point. Unless we lose, purges of the faculties are needed. Maybe with just some light reeducation camps for primary school teachers, who are only repeating what they’ve been told, and can easily learn to repeat a different mantra.

Reforming a diseased institution is a losing task, Taco. The solution is both simple and at the same time difficult to even discuss: end the student loan racket. Three generations past, people could and did work their way through school. The loan racket funds the 3x increase in costs to fund innumerable administrators and SJW requirements, plus the multitude of students who do not belong in college and the professors who should not be teaching them. Most humans should have eight years of education, which they in that event likely would take more seriously. The next four to eight years… Read more »

I stay sane by remembering that, in my lifetime, I have see the reversal of many forms of “progress” that were going to not only be permanent, but to lead to even more, better, more-WOW progress. Part of the left’s illusion/delusion is that what they see, both right now, and in the future, is the truth. People not living their Through-the-looking-Glass lives have a little better grasp on reality. I lived in their “reality” for a long time. It’s great to be back among my homies in Midlandia where we read Andrew Sullivan or WaPo and chuckle over the earnest… Read more »

Again, this is Canada – but… a couple years ago a couple dykes started heckling a stand up comic at a night club. In return he mocked the carpet munchers and they successfully sued him.
Civilized methods of dispensing with Leftie are not going to work. It is going to take bloodshed.

One of the funniest lines I heard during the past decade was one comedian’s bemoaning the lack of good comedy because “there’s nothing funny about Obama.” (Okay, in one sense, I get it, but that’s not the sense he meant it in.)

Unfortunately, the cost would be borne by taxpayers. Now if we made the universities responsible for student debt defaults, they would have a vested interest in the success of their students, and the curriculum would change dramatically away from the SJW crap.

A substantial portion of student loans aren’t going to be paid back, because they can’t be. They were just a politically expedient way to inject lots of money into the economy with a demographic that would spend it after the great recession. They will written off in some manner, probably in a combination of ways. Maybe some stealth tax stuff so the boomers who paid theirs won’t yell about it too much. Lots of stuff like this is starting to appear on the radar, presaging the inevitable: A Radical Solution to the Student Debt Crisis http://rooseveltinstitute.org/radical-solution-student-debt-crisis/ Which in addition to… Read more »

I can summarize that article for you in truth: Blacks are affirmative actioned and subsidized through college, but cannot compete in STEM, healthcare or business. So they major in useless coursework, and then cry racism when they can’t find jobs.

This is why it is impossible to reason with liberals. Conservatives can silo to a degree with Fox News, but they also can’t avoid all the MSM “news” bombarded at them every day. A liberal can go his whole life without hearing a conservative opinion, except as caricaturized through the mocking liberal house of mirrors that is the current MSM and late night comedy shows. So liberals simply cannot face reality even when it is obvious. The worst of this is that they think they are the realists.

I encourage readers here to read/listen to two recently posted items that, while not exactly co-joined point for point, are certainly bark on the same tree as this post by Z Man. On February 19, 2018 Black Pigeon Speaks posted his newest entitled “Only Catastrophe Can Reduce Inequality” In that video he discusses the content of a new book written by Stanford University professor Walter Scheidel entitled “The Great Leveler”. This relates to the observation at the end of this “Z” piece, “The fact that no one has ever pulled this off without ushering in a bloodbath never gets mentioned.”… Read more »

I would argue that the problem is deeper and more serious than what you have described. Whether earned or artificial, affluence-driven high living is making us less robust as a species (our poor are now dying of obesity related maladies). This growing weakness may take us down a peg via social-political dysfunction, or we may witness another Spanish Flu type population collapse. Efficacious ideology won’t help much with the latter.

The poor, dying of obesity? Bully! Can we please include nipples for the bottles of corn sweetener that will soon be distributed via the Presidents new Wakanda Lunchables effort?
This problem will fix itself.

Gary North has been saying for quite a while that the public schooling systems effectively functions as this society’s church: https://www.garynorth.com/members/13946.cfm ==== In every society, there is some institution that functions as the society’s church. This means that there is a priesthood. It may not be called a priesthood, but it functions as every national priesthood always has. Every priesthood works in conjunction with the established social order. —- In modern American society, there is no question what the priesthood is: the public school bureaucracy. The public school teachers constitute a priesthood. There is a common worldview/confession. There are sanctions… Read more »

Priests: Warriors :: Nerds: Jocks It’s the same dynamic. Except historically warriors and priests were separated to ply their trades. What we see today is a fusion of the two castes (University) where the priestly caste siphons off prestige from the warrior class while keeping it under its thumb to socially engineer the warrior caste in their preferred image (American football/War simulation/Elite black warrior myth). American football is the last sport you would expect a sophisticated intellectual to like. The girls don’t even understand the rules they just like the panoply. There’s not really any other reason to combine sports… Read more »

Not to go off topic but this talk about the schools has my mind on the recent Florida school shooting. I’ve noticed in the rush to reaction there are a couple ideas being pushed: 1. The age to purchase guns…any gun… must be raised to 21. 2. Some liberals so moved by students “speaking out” are now insisting the voting age be lowered to 16. So in Liberal Land 16 year olds are mature enough to help steer this nation’s fate, but not mature enough to own a gun. Plus, felons who often commit crimes with evil guns and use… Read more »

The “conservatives”, or CivNats if you prefer, remind me of the desperate to reconcile half of a separated couple, unwilling to accept that the other person has moved on. “Among the many things the “Right” still doesn’t understand is that the Left has concluded that this particular show need no longer go on. They don’t think they need a foil anymore and would rather dispense with the whole bother of staging these phony contests in which each side ostensibly has a shot.” (Publius Decius Mus, “The Flight 93 Election”, Claremont Institute, Sept. 5, 2016) The globalist elite view the political… Read more »

A lot has been said about the Right turning the tables on the Left by using Saul Alinsky tactics. In the 1993 essay linked below, Samuel Francis argues for using the tactics of communist Antonio Gramsci and work on changing, or overthrowing the culture. The Left becoming increasingly batshit-crazy makes what seems like an impossible task a little easier.https://www.chroniclesmagazine.org/winning-the-culture-war/

“As a result, the legacy conservatives carry on like it is 1984 and Dutch Reagan is riding high. Much of what so-called conservatism is these days is just a weird nostalgia trip, celebrating a fictional past with no connection to the present.” I immediately noticed that Trump’s speech at the RNC, accepting the nomination, contained no references to Reagan. This was so unusual, compared to what I’d grown used to from “conservative” politicians, that it startled me. But I found it invigorating. Trump’s speech was focused on the future, and what he would do. All conservatives want to talk about… Read more »

He’ll always remember the conversation I had with a True Believer, shortly after moving to Colorado. He was pleasant enough, we struck up a conversation over some movie or such, and then the conversation turned towards politics. He chuckled and told me that he didn’t talk politics with most people because “they weren’t intelligent enough to do it properly”, and that, since he had read Very Smart Books written by Very Smart People that used Very Smart Language, I wouldn’t even be able to understand his ideas. Now, I’m no Einstein, but I’m a pretty smart guy, and I got… Read more »

The Left is indeed a cult and a dangerous one. Some call it a Death Cult.

But that’s what happened when the progs excised God from the public domain and hijacked various protestant denominations to turn god into a nullity.

Sadly it’s now the defacto religion of the West, at least among the educated and professional classes. It also is the driver of death like animosity towards the white blue collar and middle-classes who still adhere to Western values.

It enrages them to no end why we resist their values and cling to our guns and old school values.

On a fundamental basis, the economy isn’t generating the jobs and growth that it used to. Large populations are sustained only by gov’t largesse funded by borrowed money. Medicaid pays for almost half of the births.

In time, oligarchs like Jeff Bezos are aiming to set up their own welfare state. SNAP recipients receive discounts at his establishment.